XIV
It was when Gilbert, after a most affectionate greeting and ten minutesof easy small talk, led her away from the disappointed group, thatAlice made her first mistake.
"You don't look at all well, Gilbert," she said anxiously.
The very fact that he knew himself to be not at all well made him hateto be told so. An irritable line ran across his forehead. "Oh, yes, I'mwell," he said, "never better. Come along to the summer house and let'sput a dune between us and those vultures."
He led her down a flight of stone steps and over a stretch ofundulating dry sand to the place where Hosack invariably read themorning paper and to which his servants led their village beaux whenthe moon was up, there to give far too faithful imitations of thehyena. And there he sat her down and stood in front of her,enigmatically, wondering how much she knew. "If it comes to that," hesaid, "you look far from well yourself, Alice."
And she turned her pretty, prim face up to him with a sudden tremblingof the lips. "What do you expect," she asked, quite simply, "when I'veonly had one short letter from you all the time I've been away."
"I never write letters," he said. "You know that. How's your mother?"
"But I wrote every day, and if you read them you'd know."
He shifted one shoulder. These gentle creatures could be horriblydisconcerting and direct. As a matter of fact he had failed to openmore than two of the collection. They were too full of the vibration ofa love that had never stirred him. "Yes, I'm glad she's better. I'mafraid you've been rather bored. Illness is always boring."
"I can only have one mother," said Alice.
Palgrave felt the need of a cigarette. Alice, admirable as she was, hada fatal habit, he thought, of uttering bromides.
And she instantly regretted the remark. She knew that way of his ofsnapping his cigarette case. Was that heavily be-flowered church adream and that great house in New York only part of a mirage? He seemedto be the husband of some other girl, barely able to tolerate thisinterruption. She had come determined to get the truth, howeverterrible it might be. But it was very difficult, and he was obviouslynot going to help her, and now that she saw him again, curiously wornand nervous and petulant, she dreaded to ask for facts under which herlove was to be laid in waste.
"No wonder you like this place," she said, beating about the bush.
"I don't. I loathe it. The everlasting drumming of the sea puts me onedge. It's as bad as living within sound of the elevated railway. Andat night the frogs on the land side of the house add to the racket andmake a row like a factory in full blast. I'd rather be condemned to ahospital for incurables than live on a dune." He said all this with thesort of hysteria that she had never noticed in him before. He wasindeed far from well. Hardly, in fact, recognizable. The suave,imperturbable Gilbert, with the quiet air of patronage and the coolirony of the polished man of the world,--what had become of him? Was itpossible that Joan had resisted him? She couldn't believe such a thing.
"Then why have you stayed so long?" she asked, with this new point ofview stirring hope.
"There was nowhere else to go to," he answered, refusing to meet hereyes.
This was too absurd to let pass. "But nothing has happened to the houseat Newport, and the yacht's been lying in the East River since thefirst of June and you said in your only letter that the two Japaneseservants have been at the cottage near Devon for weeks!"
"I'm sick of Newport with all its tuft-hunting women, and the yachtdoesn't call me. As for the cottage, I'm going there to-morrow,possibly to-night."
Alice got up quickly and stood in front of him. There was a spot ofcolor on both her cheeks, and her hands were clasped together."Gilbert, let's both go there. Let's get away from all these people fora time. I won't ask you any questions or try and pry into what'shappened to you. I'll be very quiet and help you to find yourselfagain."
She had made another mistake. His sensitiveness gave him as many quillsas a porcupine. "Find myself," he said, quoting her unfortunate wordswith sarcasm. "What on earth do you mean by that, my good child?"
She forced back her rising tears. Had she utterly lost her rights as awife? He was speaking to her in the tone that a man uses to aninterfering sister. "What's to become of me?" she asked.
"Newport, of course. Why not? Fill the house up. I give you a freehand."
"And will you join me there, Gilbert?"
"No. I'm not in the mood."
He turned on his heel and went to the other side of the summer house,and flicked his half-smoked cigarette into the scrub below. A frog tooka leap. When he spoke again it was with his back to her. "Don't youthink you'd better rejoin Mrs. Jekyll? She may be impatient to get off."
But Alice took her courage in both hands. If this was to be the end shemust know it. Uncertainty was not to be endured any longer. All hersleepless nights and fluctuations of hope and despair had marked her,perhaps for life. Hers was not the easily blown away infatuation of adebutante, the mere summer love of a young girl. It was the steady anddevoted love of a wife, ready to make sacrifices, to forgiveinconstancies, to make allowances for temporary aberrations and, whennecessary, to nurse back to sanity, without one word or look ofreproach, the husband who had slipped into delinquency. Not only herfuture and his were at stake, but there were the children for whom sheprayed. They must be considered.
And so, holding back her emotion, she followed him across the pompoussummer house in which, with a shudder, she recognized a horribleresemblance to a mausoleum, and laid her little hand upon his arm.
"Gilbert," she said, "tell me the truth. Be frank with me. Let me helpyou, dear."
Poor little wife. For the third time she had said the wrong thing."Help"--the word angered him. Did she imagine that he was a callowyouth crossed in love?
He drew his arm away sharply. There was something too domestic in allthis to be borne with patience. Humiliating, also, he had to confess.
"When did I ever give you the right to delve into my private affairs?"he asked, with amazing cruelty. "We're married,--isn't that enough?I've given you everything I have except my independence. You can't askfor more than that,--from me."
He added "from me" because the expression of pain on her pretty facemade him out to be a brute, and he was not that. He tried to hedge bythe use of those two small words and put it to her, withoutexplanation, that he was different from most men,--more careless andcallous to the old-fashioned vows of marriage, if she liked, butdifferent. That might be due to character or upbringing or the times towhich he belonged. He wasn't going to argue about it. The factremained. "I'll take you back," he added.
But she blocked the way. "I only want your love," she said. "If you'vetaken that away from me, nothing else counts."
He gave a sort of groan. Her persistence was appalling, her courage anindescribable reproach. For a moment he remained silent, with a drawnface and twitching fingers, strangely white and wasted, like a man whohad been through an illness,--a caricature of the once easy-goingGilbert Palgrave, the captain of his fate and the master of his soul.
"All right then," he said, "if you must know, you shall, but do me thecredit to remember that I did my best to leave things vague andblurred." He took her by the elbow and put her into a chair. With atouch of his old thoughtfulness and rather studied politeness he choseone that was untouched by the sun that came low over the dune. Then hesat down and bent forward and looked her full in the eyes.
"This is going to hurt you," he said, "but you've asked for the truth,and as everything seems to be coming to a head, you'd better have it,naked and undisguised. In any case, you're one of the women who alwaysgets hurt and always thrives on it. You're too earnest and sincere tobe able to apply eye-wash to the damn thing we call life, aren't you?"
"Yes, Gilbert," she answered, with the look of one who had been placedin front of a firing squad, without a bandage over her eyes.
There was a brief pause, filled by what he had called the everlastingdrumming of the sea.
"One ni
ght, in Paris, when I was towering on the false confidence oftwenty-one,"--curious how, even at that moment, he spoke with a certainself-consciousness,--"I came out of the Moulin Rouge alone and walkedback to the Maurice. It was the first time I'd ever been on the otherside, and I was doing it all in the usual way of the precociousundergraduate. But the 'gay Paree' stuff that was speciallymanufactured to catch the superfluous francs of the pornographictourist and isn't really in the least French, bored me, almost at once.And that night, going slowly to the hotel, sickened by painted women,chypre and raw champagne I turned a mental somersault and built up apicture of what I hoped I should find in life. It contained a woman, ofcourse--a girl, very young, the very spirit of spring, whose laughwould turn my heart and who, like an elusive wood nymph, would lead mepanting and hungry through a maze of trees. I called it the GreatEmotion and from that night on I tried to find the original of thatboyish picture, looking everywhere with no success. At twenty-nine,coming out of what seemed to be the glamor of the impossible, I marriedyou to oblige my mother,--you asked for this,--and imagined that I hadsettled into a conventional rut. Do you want me to go on with it?"
"Please, Gilbert," said Alice.
He shrugged his shoulders as much as to say, "Well, if you enjoy theChristian martyr business it's entirely your lookout."
But he dropped his characteristic habit of phrase making and becamemore jerky and real. "I respected you, Alice," he went on. "I didn'tlove you but I hoped I might, and I played the game. I liked to see youin my house. You fitted in and made it more of a home than that barrackhad ever been. I began to collect prints and first editions, adjustmyself to respectability and even to look forward with pride to a youngGilbert."
Alice gave a little cry and put her hand up to her breast. But he wastoo much obsessed by his own pain to notice hers.
"And then,--it's always the way,--I saw the girl. Yes, by God, I sawthe girl, and the Great Emotion blew me out of domestic content and thepleasant sense of responsibility and turned me into the panting hungryyouth that I had always wanted to be." He stopped and got up and walkedup and down that mausoleum, with his eyes burning and the color back inhis face.
"And the girl is Joan?" asked Alice in a voice that had an oddly sharpnote for once.
"Yes," he said. "Joan.... She's done it," he added, no longer choosinghis words. "She's got me. She's in my blood. I'm insane about her. Ifollow her like a dog, leaping up at a kind word, slinking away with mytail between my legs when she orders me to heel. My God, it's hell! I'mas near madness as a poor devil of a dope fiend out of reach of hisjoy. I wish I'd never seen her. She's made me loathe myself. She's putme through every stage of humiliation. I'd rather be dead than endurethis craving that's worse than a disease. You were right when you saidthat I'm ill. I am ill. I'm horribly ill. I'm ... I'm..."
He stammered and his voice broke, and he covered his face with hishands.
And instantly, with the maternal spirit that goes with all true womanlylove ablaze in her heart, Alice went to him and put her arms about hisneck and drew his head down on her shoulder.
And he left it there, with tears.
A little later they sat down again side by side, holding hands.
As Hosack had told himself, and Gilbert had just said, things seemed tobe coming to a head. At that moment Tootles was strung up to play herlast card, Joan was being driven back by Harry from the cottage of"Mrs. Gray" and Martin, becalmed on the water, with an empty pipebetween his teeth, was thinking about Joan.
Palgrave was comforted. The making of his confession was like having anabscess lanced. In his weakness, in his complete abandonment ofaffectation, he had never been so much of a man.
There was not to Alice, who had vision and sympathy, anything eitherstrange or perverse in the fact that Gilbert had told his story and wasnot ashamed. Love had been and would remain the one big thing in herown life, the only thing that mattered, and so she could understand,even as she suffered, what this Great Emotion meant to Gilbert. Sheadopted his words in thinking it all over. They appealed to her asbeing exactly right.
She too was comforted, because she saw a chance that Gilbert, with theaid of the utmost tact and the most tender affection, might be drawnback to her and mended. She almost used Hosack's caustic expression"rescued." The word came into her mind but was instantly discardedbecause it was obvious that Joan, however impishly she had played withGilbert, was unaffected. Angry as it made her to know that any girlcould see in Gilbert merely a man with whom to fool she was supremelythankful that the complication was not as tragic as it might have been.So long as Joan held out, the ruin of her marriage was incomplete.Hope, therefore, gleamed like a distant light. Gilbert had gone back toyouth. It seemed to her that she had better treat him as though he werevery young and hurt.
"Dearest," she said, "I'm going to take you away."
"Are you, Alice?"
"Yes. We will go on the yacht, and you shall read and sleep and getyour strength back."
He gave a queer laugh. "You talk like a mother," he said, with a catchin his voice.
She went forward and kissed him passionately.
"I love you like a mother as well as a wife, my man," she whispered."Never forget that."
"You're,--you're a good woman, Alice; I'm not worthy of you, my dear."
It pained her exquisitely to see him so humble.... Wait until she metJoan. She should be made to pay the price for this! "Who cares?" hadbeen her cry. How many others had she made to care?
"I'll go back to Mrs. Jekyll now," she went on, almost afraid thatthings were running too well to be true, "and stay at Southamptonto-night. To-morrow I'll return to New York and have everything packedand ready by the time you join me there. And I'll send a telegram toCaptain Stewart to expect us on Friday. Then we'll go to sea and bealone and get refreshment from the wide spaces and the clean air."
"Just as you say," he said, patting her hand. He was terribly like aboy who had slipped and fallen.
Then she got up, nearer to a breakdown than ever before. It was such aqueer reversal of their old positions. And in order that he shouldn'trise she put her hands on his shoulders and stood close to him so thathis head was against her breast.
"God bless you, dearest boy," she said softly. "Trust in me. Give allyour troubles to me. I'm your wife, and I need them. They belong to me.They're mine. I took them all over when you gave me my ring." Shelifted his face that was worn as from a consuming fire and kissed hisunresponsive lips. "Stay here," she added, "and I'll go back. To-morrowthen, in New York."
He echoed her. "To-morrow then, in New York," and held her hand againsthis forehead.
Just once she looked back, saw him bent double and stopped. A propheticfeeling that she was never to hear his voice again seized her in a coldgrip,--but she shook it off and put a smile on her face with which tostand before the scandal-mongers.
And there stood Joan, looking as though she had seen a ghost.